Keeping fit on Fridays
Today is the big day and our teachers prepared for the Wine Tasting last night by loading the van and will head off this afternoon, with it full of prizes, food and wine. We look forward to having our paintings at home one day soon and are glad that we too could contribute to the event and help raise funds for people in Tohoku and the Philippines.
Today we focused on animals and did one of activity using paper that looked like snakeskin. We each had a strip of paper in front of our chair and we pasted squares of the snakeskin pattern onto it. When we sat down for circle time, Shelley showed 
us pictures of different animals and we sang the initial sound of all of them e. g. horse, horse h, h, h; dragon, dragon d, d, d etc. Then we looked at the strips of paper and Shelley asked us what we thought the pattern was. Adrien said that he thought it was snakeskin. Then she asked us if we could make a snake with the strips of paper. Adrien then said: “Yes”, so she gave him a strip and he laid it down on the floor. Each of us laid our strip of paper so that we made a long snake. Some of us placed our strip where we wanted to but most of us understood what we needed to do, to be a 
part of this “snake making” exercise.
Shelley said that she doesn’t like to tell us everything because she wants us to think about things ourselves and imagine and wonder about the world that we live in. She could have drawn a snake and we could have then pasted the pieces of snakeskin onto the snake. The way we did it today was a wonderful learning experience for all of us. We will try to do more of our learning in this way. We will join our strips together and put them up on the wall. We will probably need to think about how to make the snake’s head and eyes etc. In our class, we like to 
recycle things and not waste. In Japanese we say “motainai”. So we took our colour collages off the wall and put them on the large table. We used a variety of drawing materials and will use them for birthday hearts.
During free play time, we had a great time wearing hats and covering our heads with the many things that we have in our classroom. We built towers with our friends and teachers and then, we went downstairs for KIDFIT. We are still learning about muscles in our class and used horses to gallop about with, rugby balls to throw and catch and yellow cones to stand and balance on.
Upstairs, Jennifer, Ava and Allie went straight to the cardboard castle when they arrived at school. They saw boxes, tape and a glue gun next to the castle and immediately wanted to know what we were going to do with the castle. We glued some boxes to the main wall of the castle in order to make it more sturdy and we taped some of the boxes together. Once the boxes were in place we cut out a drawbridge between them. Sean then helped cut some string and thread it through the wall and drawbridge. We were amazed because when we pulled the thread, the drawbridge went up and 
when we let it go, the drawbridge went down. At the one activity table, we made something for Momo, Sean and Jennifer because they are going to leave Ohana.
We painted pine cones green for our model castle and will mount them next week to look like trees. For the base of the model, we used the newspaper balls which we made yesterday. We tore strips of newspaper and covered the balls with the strips and some starch. This made a rough rocky surface which will need to dry and then we will paint it next week.
We hope that everyone enjoys the Wine Tasting and has a great weekend. We look forward to seeing our friends and teachers next week.
Love always, Darren, Shelley, Hisami, Ayaka, Liezel, Nanako, Goh, Christine, Maryna, Sharee and Rama